Sunset at six o’clock means that life does go on after dark: reading by lamplight on the porch, our family’s evening event. Leah had come home with the buckets of water, Mother had boiled it and set it out to cool while she worked on dinner, Rachel had dipped a cloth in it to drape across her forehead while she lay in the hammock examining her pores with the hand mirror. Ruth May had attempted to convince every family member in turn that she could lift a full water bucket by herself with her one remaining unbroken arm. I know all this without having been there. Somewhere in this subdued family din I was presumed to have been minding my own business for many hours. When I finally did return home it was as if, as usual, I had shown up late for my own life, and so I slipped into the hammock at the end of the porch and rested under the dark bougainvilleas.

A short while later Tata Ndu emerged out of darkness. He came up the steps to explain in his formal French that the tracks of a large lion, a solitary hunting male, had been spotted on the path from the river. Tata Ndu’s eldest son had just come back from there and brought this report. He had seen the marks of the little girl who drags her right foot, and the lion tracks, very fresh, covering over her footprints. He found the signs of stalking, the sign of a pounce, and a smear of fresh blood trailing into the bush. And that is how they knew the little crooked white child, the little girl without kakakaka, had been eaten. La petite blanche tordue a ete mangee. This was Tata Ndu’s sad news. Yet he looked pleased. As a favor to my parents, a party of young men, including his sons, had gone in search of the body, or what might be left of it.

I found I could not breathe as I watched his face tell this story, and the faces of the others as they received the news. My sisters could not comprehend Tata Ndu’s word salad of French and Kikongo, so were merely spellbound by the presence of a celebrity on the porch. I was the last thing on their minds, even Leah’s. Leah who had left me to the lion’s den in question. But my mother:Yes. No! She understood. She had hurried out to the porch from the cooking hut and still carried a large wooden paddle in her hand, which dripped steaming water onto the floor. Part of her hair fell in a wave across her face. The rest of her seemed unalive, like a pale wax model of my mother: the woman who could not fight fire with fire, even to save her children. Such affliction I saw on her face I briefly believed myself dead. I imagined the lion’s eyes on me like the eyes of an evil man, and felt my own flesh being eaten. I became nothing.

Our Father rose and said in a commanding voice, “Let us all pray to the Lord for mercy and understanding.”

Tata Ndu did not bow his head but raised it, not happily but proudly. Then I understood that he had won, and my father had lost. Tata Ndu came here personally to tell us that the gods of his village did not take kindly to the minister of corruption. As a small sign of Their displeasure, They ate his daughter alive.

It was very nearly impossible to make myself stand and come forward. But I did. Our Father stopped praying, for once. Tata Ndu drew back, narrowing his eyes. Perhaps it was not so much that he wanted me eaten, but that he did not like being wrong. He said no more than mbote—fare thee well. Then turned on his heel in a dignified way and left us to ourselves. He would not come back to our house again until much later, after many things had changed.

The next morning we heard the search party had found what the lion killed in my place: a yearling bushbuck. I wonder about its size and tenderness, whether the lion was greatly disappointed, and whether the bushbuck loved its life. I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires.

Leah

SOME PEOPLE WILL SEND a bread-and-butter note after you have them over to dinner. Well, Anatole sent us a boy. He arrived at our door with a written note stating that his name was Lekuyu but we were kindly requested to call him Nelson. He was to be given his meals, the privilege of sleeping in our chicken house (where a handful of wary hens had crept back home, after hiding from Mother’s killing spree for the picnic), and a basket of eggs to sell each week so he could start saving up for a wife. In exchange, Nelson would chop our firewood, boil up steaming pots of lumpy manioc, and bring us fruit, greens, and bark potions collected from the forest. He concocted a headache cure that Mother came to rely upon. He identified our snakes according to the categories of death they liked to inflict, which he acted out for us in action-packed dramas on the front porch. He undertook other surprising tasks in our household, too, on his own incentive. For example, one day he constructed a bamboo frame to hold Rachel’s hand mirror, so we could hang it up on the living-room wall for better viewing. Subsequently Nelson began each day by standing with his face three inches from the framed mirror and laboriously combing his scant hair in our living room, while smiling so broadly we feared his molars would pop out. Other people also began stepping into our house to avail themselves of our mirror in the same way. Evidently, what we had hanging up on our wall was Kilanga’s only looking glass.